A team of students from the University of Tennessee has been preparing since June 2014 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Student Cluster Competition, which will last for 48 continuous hours during the SC14 supercomputing conference on November 16 to 21, 2014, in New Orleans.

On Tuesday, August 12, through Thursday, August 14, the team performed a “mock run” for the competition in which they compiled, optimized and ran test cases for applications using the supercomputing cluster they assembled.

They start the new school year on August 20 and, between then and the time of the competition at SC14, will meet as a team once a week to maintain the continuity of their preparation for the competition and continue to sharpen their high-performance computing skills.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i33fml6QX9M

About SC14 Student Cluster Competition

SC14 will feature the Student Cluster Competition as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held as part of HPC Interconnections, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the last couple of years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia and Taiwan. In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the SC14 exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications. In the competition, teams of six students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components that does not exceed a 3120-watt power limit (26-amp at 120-volt), and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes. Both “off-the-shelf” and “off-the-wall” solutions are encouraged.